Jáaji Approx.

SYNOPSIS: Audio recordings of the filmaker's father are juxtaposed with videos gathered of the landscapes the two separately traversed, question the relationships between between recorder and recordings, new and traditional, memory and song. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

SYNOPSIS: History is written by the victors, but this film reminds us that the history of the oppressed can still be saved from being extinguished. Native American video artists Adam and Zack Khalil reclaim the narrative of the Ojibway of Sault Ste. Marie, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from the archives and museums that would confine it to the past. Using personal interviews, animated drawings, performance, and provocative intercutting, the Khalil brothers’ feature debut makes a bold case for the Ojibway people to be their own storytellers—while seeking a cure for the damage inflicted by colonization—in a spiritual reconnection with tradition.

Bisonhead

SYNOPSIS: A family of Ponderai Native American hunters journey from northern Montana to Yellowstone National Park to assert their treaty right to hunt by participating in the controversial culling of the park’s wild bison.

Kay Walkingstick: An American Artist

SYNOPSIS: Throughout her career, artist Kay Walkingstick has defied categorization. Her work has spanned styles from abstraction to realism and materials from acrylic to saponified wax creating a complex assortment of work that resists summary and generalization.

What Was Ours

DOCUMENTARY / Runtime: 89 min. / Native FilmDirected by Mat Hames

SYNOPSIS: A young Arapaho journalist and a teenage powwow princess travel from the Wind River Indian Reservation with a Shoshone elder to explore vanished artifacts kept in the archives of a museum. As the elder looks to the future, the young people look to the past to revive hope for their beloved home.

The Thunderbird Over the Whale

SYNOPSIS: Spencer McCarty is an artist working in Neah Bay Washington. An accident prevents him from fishing and whaling regularly as his ancestors once did. He has spent his life reconciling the teachings of his ancestors with the modern world he has found himself in, where whaling is not practiced.

Kivalina

SYNOPSIS: The Arctic, once a frozen and inaccessible landscape today is a highly coveted last frontier. KIVALINA tells the story of an Inupiaq Eskimo tribe whose island is disappearing into the Alaskan Arctic. With no resources to move and only a precarious sea wall to protect them, the film poetically explores the community's struggle to maintain their way of life within a landscape and a system that is failing them.

Marceline Blurr

NARRATIVE SHORT / Runtime: 15 min.Directed by Nadia Mata Portillo

SYNOPSIS: Inspired by the movies of the French New Wave, Marceline Blurr is the story of a young woman who was born with a vision impairment extremely out of the ordinary. For her the world is a magical place.

Best and Most Beautiful Things

DOCUMENTARY / Runtime: 91 min.Directed by Garrett Zevgetis

SYNOPSIS:Best and Most Beautiful Things is a celebration of outcasts everywhere, following a precocious young blind woman who disappears into quirky obsessions and isolation.